“We are the echoes/the refugees of echoes,” writes Carol Adler in one of her best-known poems. In The Death of Santa Claus & Other Stories, Adler describes how she became the refugee of her own “echoes.” “After revisiting these stories many years after they had been highly praised and published in well-known literary and general interest magazines,” says Adler, “I found myself feeling the discomfort of a foreigner or refugee.

“Each of these stories begged to be transported out of the micro-cosmos of memorabilia into the macro-cosmos of a greater Reality where Creator and Created are One and every description, every nuance becomes a ‘holographic echo of itself’; together forming a self-fulfilling prophesy. “I set to work, revising each story and compiling them into a collection that bears the name of one of the most traumatic events in my life.”

South Florida isn’t exactly the Promised Land that forty-nine-year-old newly widowed Keri Anders had in mind when she decided to transplant herself from the Northeast. Lonely and lost, she is the perfect victim for a string of mishaps that in a matter of days strip her of job, cash, credit cards – and credibility. She doesn’t even have to look for trouble; it comes to meet her head-on. Tripping over a beer bottle on an early morning run and getting badly cut up lands her in the arms of David Chipperton, a surgeon married to a wealthy Palm Beach socialite: the perfect lover for any neophyte on a crash course in self-destruction.Frustration and fear is a match made in hell. Keri is a writer and “Chip” wants to become one; Chip is wealthy and Keri needs to pay her bills. The co-dependency begins and although friends come to the rescue, Keri has no desire to be saved. Only after she gets down on her hands and knees and starts scrubbing away at her own snobbery and elitism, does she begin to see why she planted herself in this “swamp of human refuse: aliens, drop-outs, drunks and drug pushers.” A tough action-packed novel that is far more than a love story. You will want to read this book more than once.

Here is “tongue-in-cheek”entertainment at its wackiest—and most subtle. If anyone ever doubted that sex makes the world go around, author Sarah Daniels will put your mind, and body to test. Non-stop humor and wisdom are bundled together todeliver one of life’s most important unheeded lessons: each of us has a unique destiny to discover, and until we find and embark on that destiny, life may be one bowl of cherry pits after another.Enter CoCo Bernstein, fresh from an ugly divorce, determined to finally do what she loves and let the money follow. Enter Ralph Leavitt, with his bargain Early Bird Special coupons and septuagenarian sex drive, whose only goal is to bed CoCo down forever as his Spiritual Slave and Body of Choice. The net result is a comedy of errors that keeps getting better as the characters begin to shape-shift into the personas of their own undoing.

Come As You Are is loaded with lacy subliminals straight from Frederick’s Hollywood memoirs and Victoria’s secret chest. Adult language and scenes.

Gissalayne Chondroitin, Ph.D. times 5 in jobless academic disciplines, Associate Director of Hook, Line & Sinker, LLC, an employment agency in Rochester, New York, “We give you the rod, you hook the fish,” has one agenda: find a man, fast. But not any man; the sugarcone.com internet match websites has already led her down the disaster trail too many times. Magically—or maybe not--on New Years Day of YK24 (2004) Jonas Foreplay sits down in the empty plastic seat next to her at the SeaTac airport on her way home from her most recent sugarcone.com failure. In this fast-reading novel, Adler neatly hides the truth of what’s really happening right in your own back yard. (ISBN 978-1-934280-63-8) $14.95 + S & H

Is the extinctive life worth living? CoCo Bernstein ponders between orgasms throughout this naughty little book by Carol Adler. Unlike Plato and other philosophers of the past, however, who would probably make a big deal out of a question like that, CoCo really couldn’t care less or even more, for that matter. It is simply a statement that any person, male or female would make at any age when life itself has failed to produce anything but surprises, day in and day out, especially when most of us except maybe a few diehards, end up creating our own reality.

The title of this work,The Extinctive Life, derives its origin from CoCo’s acute awareness that from the moment we let out our first cry, we begin our slippery-slope-downhill-slide towards physical extinction. Added to this for a woman after the age of 45 with or without stretch marks, is the issue of vanity. No longer is it easy to stroll the world’s topless beaches wearing only a G-string. Even the G-spot needs regular lube jobs.

Statistics tell us that middle-age women are doomed to end up in a dark hole of sexual fantasies about men who never were, based on the harsh reality of men who never come, come too soon or not at all. At some point, life goes limp or just limps along as a withered and obscure litany of could’ve-should’ve-beens. Statistics all tell us certain things about men that do not bear repeating, since they are already well known.CoCo has no interest in statistics. Long ago she concluded that such drivel was probably created by someone who was having a bad hair day or who had just been dumped by her stalemate.